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On December 6, we're inviting you to a lecture held by one of the most prominent Americanists today, Professor Donald E. Pease.

Prof. Pease directs the annual Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth and is the editor of The New Americanist series, which has transformed the field of American studies. Some of his publications include Theodor Seuss Geisel, New American Exceptionalism, and many more.

The essay argues that it is necessary to complicate spatial approaches to nationality by an acknowledgment of the equally important function of temporality in the imaginative constructions of the nation. The movement “beyond the nation” is not necessarily only a movement away from a particular territory but can also be a movement away from a particular temporal narrative.

Pisarz-Ramirez, Gabriele. “Transnationality and Temporality in Early African American Texts”. In The International Turn in American Studies, eds. Marietta Messmer and Armin Paul Frank. Interamericana 7 (Frankfurt: Lang, 2015): 209–230.

The essay investigates how racialization is employed as a form of capital at a time when multiracial figures have taken center-stage in fashion magazines, films, and the music scene and are imbued in the media with utopian visions of a ‘postracial’ future. I argue that racial ambiguity is commercially exploited as a resource, both to commodify racialization and to make it appear structurally irrelevant at the same time.

On Tuesday, November 28 @ 7pm, Tobias Enge and the Geographical Society Leipzig will hold a lecture at the Grassimuseum Leipzig focusing on figures of predators in oral narrative traditions of North American Plains Indians.

For more information on the event, please see the attached invitiation.

American Studies Leipzig is launching a new DFG-funded Research Network. The research initiative aims to explore the symbolic operations that take place in the liminal area between narrative and other symbolic forms (such as data/bases, play, ritual, etc). It thus seeks to complement American studies' interest in narrative, surging since the narrative turn, by an interest in other symbolic forms.

Join the American Space Leipzig for a roundtable discussion with Dr. Derek Scissors on Chinese-American relations and transpacific economic partnership.

Dr. Scissors is resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he focuses on the Chinese and Indian economies and on US economic relations with Asia. He is the chief economist of the China Beige Book, a leading international source for following the Chinese economy.